“One hundred and twenty guided missiles now float past us and beneath the world’s longest cable-stayed suspension bridge,” marveled Nikolai Valentinov, standing at the frosty windows. “It never ceases to impress.”
“As it is designed to do,” affirmed Georgy Korsakov.
The conference room atop the School of Regional and International Studies overlooks the passage that the Russian Pacific Fleet takes past Russky Island on the way to Vladivostok. The ship moving past them in a snowstorm is the cruiser Varyag, named after the Varangians, the Vikings who first established the Russian State, long before the Mongol archers rode west.
The meeting is one of many scheduled in order to direct clandestine activities in the American Rocky Mountains.
Nikolai wonders at the recent communiqué, “Victor wishes us to send him a kilogram of gold dust? That is worth at least thirty-five thousand American dollars. Victor is not shy as all good spies should be.”
Georgy shrugs, “Young people are impatient. They all wish to become capitalists. Next Victor will want shares of General Motors, and a pretty secretary.”
Leonid Bulganin corrects them lightheartedly, “Victor gets his secretaries on his own. Never is there a shortage of nurses and television weathergirls for Victor Rostov. He sows the American genome with the seed of mother Russia.”
Nikolai continues, “This confuses me. At our last meeting, we had decided that he must be told to slow down the American project. We suggested that he sabotage the guidance system or foment worker unrest. Perhaps men may respond to the lure of gold, but how can gold send them off boring into the wrong direction?”
Vladimir Kerensky teases their spy’s intentions from out of the available facts at hand. His file on Project Prevent Armageddon is now complete as of February 23rd. This is the Russian holiday known as Defender of the Fatherland Day. The encrypted e-mail from Victor Rostov has told them that such irony is obvious even to the casual observer.
“The mechanical and electrical design drawings that we asked Victor to steal for us clearly show that the tunnel boring machines can run themselves. This includes their steering. Their compass direction is programmable. The default setting is automatically overridden to change direction if the mineral Rhyolite is sensed.”
“How does that work?” Asks Georgy.
“By means of a bit of cleverness. I shall explain.
“The Americans have four mass spectrometers in the control room of each machine. There are four intakes behind the cutterface—left, right, down, and up. Each is thirty feet of arc apart. These continuously sample and record. My guess is that he will salt the mine, so to speak, with a false trail of gold.
“Then the workers will respond like men always do, by chasing the gold—off in a different direction, away from the magma chamber. They will reprogram their guidance system to steer toward the quadrant in which Victor has planted the gold.
“Or perhaps Victor has learned that something in the geology that responds to gold.”
“Perhaps so,” shrugs Leonid.
Vladimir bows slightly, “Merely assumptions.”
Leonid finalizes, “Then we should buy the gold on the international market. Do not send him Russian gold. They Americans may be able trace it, as they already do with Uranium isotopes.”
Enough work, Nikolai Valentinov thinks. “Send for the girl. More vodka,” he carouses.
Victor Rostov’s spymasters did not know much about tunnel boring machines, and neither did Victor at the beginning, but he learned fast. Victor worked on the subterranean construction from start to finish. He kept his scrap metal business going on the side. And then, he landed a job in the tunnels. The man was not afraid of hard work. In fact, Victor Rostov was not afraid of very much at all.
But the main thing about Victor was that he was smart. In fact, he went way past smart and into clever.
That is probably the signal characteristic of spies. Otherwise, they might not last very long. But then, I only know about one spy. But that one was a humdinger.
By the time the men in Vladivostok decided to slow down the American project, Victor had taught himself a great deal about TBM’s. He began paying particular attention to the probe drill.
Depending on conditions, a TBM might be fitted with a lot of them, but each Yellowstone machine had only one. The geology had been so uniform and the progress so rapid, that they had not even used it until April.
A TBM cannot see where it is going, but it is able to feel its way forward by drilling into the rock ahead to sample for hardness, voids, and water. Those drill bits can probe a hundred feet out in front.
The cutterhead does not like voids or mixed conditions, and on such jobs, cutter wheels are replaced more often and even the cutterface can crack. Welding inside the cutterhead or at the rock face is not uncommon, but it slows a project down.
This is why fifty percent utilization is normally your best result and engineers are always happy when they get it. On most jobs, they will even pull back the cutterhead to put men in front to fill such voids with cement grout. This is so the cutterhead can rotate on plane to stay within the Kerf, and not lose its bearings or crack.
But the Madison Valley geology is uniform. All of it is microscopically close-grained Basalt. And so, the cutter wheels are replaced only when boring wears them down.
The probe drill is being used, now that Jeter is getting close. He hopes that they will find a trace of some volcanic neck attached to the main magma chamber, which they might reach sooner and to the same effect.
The Colonel keeps his eyes peeled for a shortcut. He wants any way he can find to get there sooner. And Victor Rostov, who works for the Colonel, keeps his eyes peeled for any way to slow him down.